I am a GP trained in Homeopathic Medicine as well as an Acute and Emergency Specialist, and have been working as a MD since 1989. Originally, I am from Hungary, where I had a popular GP practice for many years before moving to Denmark and then to the UK. Since moving to England in 2009, I have been working at Royal London Hospital of Integrative Medicine, formerly the Royal London Homeopathic Hosp
ital. In December 2013 I was asked by Pulse, the UK’s leading medical monthly publication, to write an article on why I chose to become a Medical Homeopath. You can read the article in its entirety bellow:
Title: 'Why I chose...to be a GP homoeopathist':
"I felt I was becoming a frustrated GP, and I didn’t like it. My practice of seven years had been growing slowly but steadily, the last patient satisfaction survey had shown a very encouraging picture and, most importantly, the sight of my patients leaving the office with a big smile and a sigh of relief was not uncommon at all, on the contrary. Still, when I was looking at the hopeful face of Mr Jones, I couldn’t help feeling frustrated. I had then been a doctor for twelve years, a specialist of emergency care and of general practice, having seen hundreds of similar cases before and still I was helpless. Mr Jones, my new patient who moved into the area the week before, had been suffering of essential hypertension for a decade and taken just about every antihypertensive there is, for shorter or longer periods. He was currently taking a triple combination of antihypertensives, plus several other medicines for his concomitant problems – that was thirteen (yes, thirteen) different kinds of prescription drugs and yet he was full of complaints and symptoms and, very rightly, expected that I would solve his problems right then and there. But I couldn’t. We had been talking about his health for about twenty minutes then. I started with offering prescription drugs recommended by the applicable therapeutic guidelines. He had taken them all before and stopped because of either side effects or lack of efficacy. I talked about additional options then, such as increasing doses, replacing some elements of his multiple combinations, dropping certain drugs, everything. None of it was good, even I couldn’t really believe we would find the right solution. And he was not the first, nor the only one. It appeared that evidence-based medicine, however effective for the vast majority of my clientele, could not always offer a solution for every individual, even if their maladies were amongst the most common ones. While the balance of benefits versus risks has indeed been found positive for our medicines in clinical trials, this is not always true for every single patient. The words of the Hippocratic Oath came to my mind: “I will come for the benefit of the sick.” Was it really in Mr Jones’s best interest for me to continue prescribing him drugs that he himself said he didn’t want to take any longer as he felt they didn’t really help him? Wasn’t there any other way? So that was the trigger that made me start searching and learning. What I really needed was to be able to use medicines that either complement our common drugs or are alternatives to them. I have happily found that many universities all over Europe were offering courses on complementary and alternative medicine, thousands of doctors were practicing it, many health insurance organisations including the NHS were funding it, and patients were not only liking, but often demanding it. And a few years later I became a certified Medical Homeopath. Homeopathy is often referred to as “the gentle treatment”, because of the apparent lack of undesirable effects. It is typically and mostly used in addition to traditional prescriptions in situations such as the one I described above. Polypharmacy and multimorbidity are the two most difficult problems to handle in a GP practice, so any option to reduce the number of concomitantly used active substances should be welcomed whenever possible. Indeed, homeopathy is a viable option for many patients to complement their chronic therapies with a carefully selected remedy thus allowing a reduction of their doses and/or simplifying their treatment regimes. In some, less common, situations it can even be used as an alternative to chemicals, with great caution. Being an empirical branch of medicine, homeopathy is individual and, like all other types of medicine, it may or may not work for a certain patient in a certain situation, so it is paramount that evidence- and guideline-based treatment must never be denied. Nevertheless, I have dozens, if not hundreds of cases when homeopathy turned out to be sufficient, e.g. in cases when a patient was reluctant or unable to take a prescription medicine for fear of expected side effects. Naturally, it cannot solve every situation, but as a GP, my frustration has eased considerably since I have been able to offer something additional, something different to those patients of mine that are in the highest need. Homeopathy is not for everyone, though. For doctors to use it to maximum benefit it requires not only years of laborious studying but an awful lot of the GP’s most precious commodity: time to be spent with the patient. A homeopathic interview can rarely be fitted into the constraints of a 10-minute appointment as the doctor must get to know the person in detail, not only the disease. And for patients it requires an open mind to accept the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary. So, in daily GP practice I only ever offer it to those who either request it themselves or those that really have exhausted all other possibilities."
